Hey. I have just installed Yosemite OSx and loving it. However the one item that is annoying is the lack of ability to add the Apple iCloud drive to your desktop. I don’t use finder that much and like to have my connected devices on the desktop. A way around this is to follow the procedures below. Open your Home / Profile and then click on the drop down cog. Click on ‘Show View Options’

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I had to start the Remote Registry service on a whole bunch of Windows boxes. This post is coming from two angles. 1) I wanted to show how the code below can be reused time and time again for multiple servers / workstations. 2) I wanted to show you the command for setting the service to enable and then starting it.

The Set-Service cmdlet is quite good. I had been used to using WMI but Set-Service fits the bill perfect. So you could replace the Set-Service with any other command you would like to use. The foreach query is a good one to have kicking around.

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I had a need to query multiple remote systems looking for Event ID of 1000 in the Application log with Event Type of Error. I also only wanted to return the items if the word Outlook was contained in the message body. The script below can be changed to fit your needs. You may want to omit the $WindowsMessageMatch variable unless you are also looking to return Outlook.

Everything has been set as a variable so you should just need to adjust and run.

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So had this interesting message when trying to connect a SQL System DSN. Logged on with a domain account , the domain account had access to SQL and SysAdmin rights. When trying to view the list of databases I was presented with

OK so time to start digging around. On this particular SQL setup the SQL service was running under a domain user with no admin rights apart from local admin rights on the server. Using the Power of the shell I issued the command below which returned no values.

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So I had a need to check if the 32 or 64bit Quest Software – Active Directory Management tools were installed. I just wanted to give an example of how easy it is to perform this check and maybe give you ideas of how you could use it in your day-to-day scripting.

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So working with UNC paths in some Powershell was fun recently with the script not performing how I wanted. So thinking there must be a better way of achieving this I set about having a hunt around in the Powershell Cmdlets. And of course there was, our good old friend New-PSDrive which ashamedly I don’t take advantage of more

So an example of how to use PSDrive is below. I found this massively helpful

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So here is a quick bit of Powershell code to read the contents of a .txt file called Config.txt on the root of the C:. It will read the text file and then edit it when it finds “Hello the date is”. Once finished it will save it out to a new text file called ConfigNew.txt

I have included $Date so that you can see how easy it is to include a variable in to the text file.

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Had an issue where a new imaged Windows 7 machine via MDT threw up warning messages for the Intel graphics cards and do I wish to trust them.

It would seem that as I downloaded them from HP site, Windows had set the file-blocked check mark. To get around this issue the Powershell one liner below. Of course this can be used on any file that you have downloaded and need to unblock.

This caught me off guard a little today. Brand new install of ESXi 5.1 , just built and then tried to add it to v Center. On trying this I received the message below.

The Evaluation Mode license assigned to Host has expired. Recommend updating the license

This was odd because when I logged direct in to the host I was prompted that I had 59 days left. The issue was that the date and time on the host was way out. I changed this to point to a NTP server , rebooted the host and everything was good to go.

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So have been having an issue with Office 2011 on my Macbook and specifically Outlook 2011. I run two Exchange accounts on my MAC, One with Exchange 2013 and one with Exchange 2010. The Exchange 2013 account is fine with no issues but the Exchange 2010 account keeps prompting for my credentials every few minutes. It has become so annoying that I actually had to do something about it.

So I have checked all the basics like my password is correct, it’s not expired etc. The issue seems to be with the username field. Typically you would expect to type DOMAINUsername and all would be good with the world. It would seem for some reason that on my install I need to type DOMAINUsername

Anyway hope this saves someone some time and less frustration than it did for me.

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I have been meaning to write this blog post for sometime. Ever since SkyDrive launched I have been using it as a backup to my Macbook profile. How you may ask? Well below I am going to show you how to redirect say your Mac Documents to a Documents folder in your SkyDrive and have the Mac behave like before. The benefit of this is that you can continue to use your Mac as you normally would but with the added benefit that should you loose or rebuild your Mac that the data is already up in SkyDrive. Now before we go any further, its worth making a point that you must have a backup of any files or folders in your profile that you want to move to SkyDrive. As you are going to see, we are going to be deleting some folders.

For the purpose of this post. I have a 256 GB solid state drive which I have partitioned so that I have the Mac OS on one partition and my Mac profile and other stuff along the way on the second partition. Also you are going to need to change the path names to match your own setup but I hope you get the idea.

So as you can see this is a standard Mac profile and I have already downloaded and installed SkyDrive which is fully synchronised

Working with a Server 2012 VMware template and how to deal with activating the server during build time.
Part of the issue is that I did not want the template to be part of the KMS activation. I wanted the
option of MAK or KMS and so below is a Powershell script I knocked up to give you the option.

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One Powershell CMDLet I like and use quite a bit is Get-QADGroupMember and using it for example thus:

Get-QADGroupMember GROUP-NAME-HERE

The issue comes when you want to display the members of any nested groups. When going through the properties of the Get-QADGroupMember CMDLet I noticed that there is a -Indirect switch. This switch will retrieve the nested member.

Get-QADGroupMember -Indirect GROUP-NAME-HERE

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So using PSEXEC to remove software is an oldie but a goodie. I had a situation where trying to remote uninstall software on Windows XP via Powershell , VBScript and even SMS 2003 was not quite playing ball. The PSEXEC method is a little dirty but it’s very fast and effective. You could of course substitute the msiexec command for anything else that you would like to run on the remote PC.

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I stumbled across an issue on a vShere 4.1 and 4.1 vCenter. I was trying to deploy a server from template which kept on crashing out. When I converted the template to a VM I was unable to edit the settings.

I was receiving the message below

The server fault ‘SystemError’ had no message

I was able to get around this issue by shutting down the VM and then removing it from the Inventory and then adding it back in again

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vSphere 5.5 has been released for all to download. We’re sure vSphere users are all eager to install a copy and start kicking the tires, and we’re just as eager to see that you get started on the right foot. With this in mind, we have created the following list of Knowledge base articles that are brand new, or have been updated for vSphere 5.5 You’ll notice lots of best practices KBs here.

Hi Guys, So here is a Powershell script that I have been working on. The script will connect to Active Directory and export a list of servers where the OSName contains SERVER. It will then ask you what software you would like to search for on the servers. You can search and return everything or something specific. It will output this all to .CSV file. You can change the Get-QADComputer command to return the type of machine you want.

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So I had a request to export some data from Active Directory in to a CSV file. Easy I thought as exported data out loads of times. The issue came when I needed to export out the users Secretary and the Secretary extension number.

Then you would see that the results for the secretary are the CN=LastName, FirstName,OU=blah blah blah. That is no good and can’t have that in the CSV export. Now I can’t take full credit for the code below as Art over on the PowerGUI forums has been most helpful in working with me to produce something that achieves what I need Read more…